Walter Pincus, Glenn Greenwald square off

American journalists “have decided to focus their intrepid journalistic attention not on the extremist and legally dubious surveillance behavior of the US government and serial deceit by its top officials, but on those who revealed all of that to the world,” Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald wrote in an email to Washington Post columnist Walter Pincus Tuesday.

A Pincus column published Monday drew connections between Greenwald and WikiLeaks, which is providing support to Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who leaked secret documents about government surveillance to Greenwald, the documentarian Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman, who’s reported on Snowden’s leaks for The Washington Post.

“Poitras and Greenwald are well-known free-speech activists, with many prior connections,” Pincus writes, noting they were founding members of a foundation that supports “groups that engage in transparency journalism and support whistleblowers, including WikiLeaks.”

He says Greenwald “wrote for the WikiLeaks Press’s blog about Poitras and WikiLeaks being targeted by U.S. government officials” and that WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange “previewed the first Greenwald Guardian story based on Snowden documents” in late May, a week before Greenwald’s first scoop appeared.
Greenwald says the first article Pincus references was published in Salon and that “Neither it, nor anything else I’ve ever written, was written ‘for the WikiLeaks Press’s blog.’” I wasn’t able to locate such a blog, though WikiLeaks’ press page suggests Greenwald as a source for journalists.

It also lists Bianca Jagger, Michael Moore and Jay Rosen and says such people “do not represent WikiLeaks; they are listed because they are knowledgeable about the topics.” Greenwald has “a very strong understanding of WikiLeaks issues and [the Bradley] Manning case,” the page says.

Despite how troubling the NSA’s surveillance practices are, the American people seem content to live with them. Moreover, the news cycle has moved on, dominated now by The Zimmerman trial, Egypt, et al. Finally, Greenwald doesn’t seem to have any more big revelations up his sleeve.

Walter Pincus and others should keep asking these sorts of questions, there are a lot of discrepancies in this story. In fact, Pincus was right about the “preview,” but he just didn’t point to the right previous — Poitras, Appelbaum and Binney appearing in April 2012 with a prefiguring of this story, a kind of trial run of the ultimate Snowden story.

What were Jacob Appelbaum and Edward Snowden both doing in Hawaii in April 2012 and April 2013?

Pincus appears to be auditioning for the Westbrook Pegler awards of 2013 . . .

Alfred Ingram

The time to complain was when the original PATRIOT act was passed by a congress that did not possibly have the time to read it. After that, when warrantless wiretapping, evading the law was done in the previous administration. Now the issue is the amended act, a congress that cries crocodile tears and a system that is set up to locate all the haystacks and is therefore more likely to find trhe needle.